Life-size cutouts of deployed service members

are given by the Maine National Guard to spouses, children and relatives back home.

The Flat Daddies ride in cars, sit at the dinner table, visit the dentist and even are brought to confession, according to their significant others on the home front.

At the request of relatives, about 200 Flat Daddy and Flat Mommy photos have been enlarged and printed at the state National Guard headquarters in Augusta, Maine. The families cut out the photos, which show the Guard members from the waist up, and glue them to a $2 piece of foam board.

Take that, designers of pillows-that-hug, USB-devices-that-emit-fragrance, robots-that-care-for-elders, simulated-dogs-that-soothe. A low-fi (functionally) but hi-fi (representationally) has dramatic (anecdotal) impact. Should we be chastened, saddened, or charmed?

A two-day summit on The Future of Web Apps

The web’s future is clearly a sausage fest. 2.0 needs women!

powered by ODEO

Done with Odeo. From first visit to their site to this posting, maybe 3 minutes.

Seen on The Mall in DC, a temporary marker for a permanent marker.

(it reads “perm survery mkr”)

This NPR story looks at the “interview coach” at ESPN and their attempts to bring a high level of quality to their interviewing. Page links to the NPR program and an exemplary interview and critique.

Now, every single editorial employee at ESPN is expected to attend a three-day seminar, where they encounter a lanky, slightly awkward 58-year-old man with little flash. In his efforts to illustrate what he considers the “seven deadly sins of interviewing,” John Sawatsky methodically eviscerates the nation’s most prominent television journalists.

“I want to change the culture of the journalistic interview,” Sawatsky says. “We interview no better now than we did 30 years ago. In some ways, we interview worse.”

There’s a lot to be learned from journalists; not everything applies to other forms of interviewing (say, interviewing users) of course.

I haven’t listened to this yet; checking it out will be first up tomorrow.

[via kottke.org]

I blogged about my UXWeek hotel before I headed to DC and again after I arrived (when they have my reservation - expecting me to arrive one day later). Here’s some thoughts about the rest of the experience there.

The elevator had lovely but deadly ceiling lighting. There was no place you could stand (regardless of height or headwear) that would prevent these lights from shining uncomfortably into your eyes. You had to bob and weave to see the buttons for choosing a floor, and then shift around the space inside during your ride in order to minimize the just-outside-awareness annoyance (like when a bug flits near your skin and although you don’t consciously realize what it is you are still annoyed by it).

This sink in my bathroom drove me nuts. Only one control, to the right of the very large and prominent faucet. The control swivels between its current position, let’s call that 6 o’clock, and 90 degrees to the right - say, 3 o’clock. I never managed to get Hot or Cold out of the tap, though, so I never really figured it out. For the first set of uses, I just tilted the control back and got warm enough/cold enough water to do my washing. Then I saw it rotated right, only.

Meanwhile, every time I’d go to wash my hands I’d “miss” because I’d be aiming for the hot tap on the left of the faucet and then I’d get sort of confused with my eyes and my hands when crossing under that huge faucet. It sounds dumb when explained logically, but in terms of instinct, I could just not manage to use this sink easily.

One night I got up to get a drink directly from the faucet and smacked myself pretty hard in the forehead with the giant metal faucet. That’ll make going back to sleep fun.

I hated this sink, but only once I tried to use it.

Looking at the clock radio, I saw that familiar connector and realized hey, that’s for an iPod. I liked the visual branding of the connector; slightly obscure but not entirely so. It semi-subtlely announces what it’s capable of by showing those pins (and connectors are often relegated to the back of the house)

It was really nice to be able to listen to my own music while I was in my room; I made good use of this feature. Sort of a weird interface; I had to keep pressing buttons to get it to play but it was also simple enough I didn’t really mind. I probably blamed myself for not really trying to figure it out - if I had taken 3 minutes to study and learn that would have explained the use model well enough that each action would confidently produce a desired result. But meanwhile, I was getting music and that was good.

Otherwise, the hell just seemed like good ideas that no one really thought through. Lots of half measures that reminded you of the flavor of good service but not the actual experience of it. Every lunch buffet seemed to be missing some implement - gorgeous chunks of chocolate but nothing to cut them with (although maybe it was simply display chocolate we weren’t meant to eat - what a concept) or cold cuts and bread where the bread was rolls with raisins or chunks of baguette that weren’t sliced lengthwise.

The main restroom near the conference was staffed by a guy with bright yellow rubber gloves on. Was he a men’s room attendant? Or was he always in there cleaning? It was pretty unclear and it was of course uncomfortable - how were we supposed to be interacting? No script for that one.

Other people reported the bar and restaurant had lovely tables that seemed at the wrong height for the chairs (or the chairs being the wrong height for the tables). That seemed the theme here - nice looking stuff that was just hard enough to use to make you feel wrong or awkward.

Let’s hope they get this stuff sorted out; I fear they are so far off the mark, though, putting up layers of surfaces without trying them out, that it may never resolve.

Strange sign seen near the UXWeek hotel in D.C. Fractured Prune is a strange name for a donut shop (I mean shoppe). Their website explains how they named the chain after Prunella Shriek, a female athlete (sometimes injured) and landowner from the 1800s. But more interesting (as if the story of Prunella isn’t jaw-dropping in and of itself) is that “Here’s the fun part — you pick the toppings, glazes and sugars for your donuts!” from choices such as

* GLAZES
honey, banana, chocolate, maple, strawberry, raspberry, peanut butter, mocha, mint, cherry, lemon, orange, blueberry, mixed berry, caramel
* TOPPINGS
rainbow sprinkles, chocolate sprinkles, coconut, peanuts, Oreo® cookie, mini chocolate chips, graham cracker crumbs
* SUGARS
powdered, granulated, cinnamon/sugar

and resulting in a wild array of interesting combinations:

Peppermint Patty
Mint / Mini Chips

Blueberry Hill
Blueberry / Powdered Sugar

Trail Mix
Banana / Nuts / Coconut / Jimmies

Who knew? I just saw a strange logo and an old deli being torn down. Looks like an interesting version of a familiar product, with customization as an easy but powerful tool for reinvention. I would bet it’s a pretty fun experience, too.

Snausages® Fortune Snookies™ are dog treats with canine-centric fortunes printed on ‘em. It doesn’t matter that dogs can’t read, I guess. We’re taking the whole projection/pets-as-family thing really really far; I’m sure it’ll go further, but this is awfully silly.

The New Yorker has a nifty-yet-brief piece of observational research on part of the Netflix process; incoming envelopes unloaded and outgoing ones loaded.

forty employees (“associates,” in Netflix parlance) are ready for work. The majority are women who were born in Africa and in Asia. At 6:30 A.M., they sit down in ergonomic chairs and begin the process known as “rental return.” An associate tears open an envelope that contains a sleeve enclosing a disk, tosses the empty envelope into a recycling bin, removes the DVD from its sleeve, checks the title on the DVD (when “Black Dog” arrives in a sleeve for “The Triangle,” the mismatched sleeve is discarded and “Black Dog” is re-sleeved), checks the condition of the sleeve (those with coffee stains or other evidence of having been used as coasters will also be replaced), checks the condition of the DVD (for scratches and cracks), and extracts customer notes (“THROW THIS DAMN DISK AWAY. IT DOES NOT WORK AFTER EPISODE 2, CHAPTER 4!”). Fingers flying and heads swivelling, the women each open between four hundred and fifty and eleven hundred and fifty returned rentals an hour.

Hitler Cafe
Originally uploaded by Poagao.

This MetaFilter thread has lots of the needed jokes but also many other examples in the US and elsewhere of dictator kitsch, or at least questionable political (in)sensitivity in the naming of restaurants.

And today we learn they are going to change the name of the restaurant.

I’m still facinated by the different cultural norms this exposed. In the West we’ve been laughing in confused outrage over how some cartoons could upset Muslins. But the paper yesterday had a quote from a student who said basically “Hitler was a bad man, but that doesn’t mean I can’t eat the food here.” It’s ludicrous until you stop for a minute - the connection we draw between eating at a place named after Hitler and belief or support for his actions is not necessarily a universal one. Any more than cartoon images in a Danish newspaper are understandably offensive to us.

In considering the non-surprise over the non-blockbuster Snakes opening I wrote:

I guess a Rocky Horror cult particpation thing could have emerged (and still could; it’s early days, some of these films take on second and third and beyond lives), but it didn’t seem likely.

Hmm. Check out the Suspension of Disbelief Society who

have dedicated our lives to watching the worst movies possible using a combination of military-grade safety gear and near-lethal levels of intoxication to preserve our delicate brains from the horror.

and their enthusiastic Rocky Horror-esque participation in actually seeing the film.


Costumed partiers attend Snakes on a Plane

Originally uploaded by mikek.

John comments (I’m sorry - I can’t call you Niblettes and keep a straight face) about the Hitler restaurant and refers to “dictator kitsch” citing Che and Mao. Very good point.

Here’s a booth selling caricatures that we saw earlier this year in Hong Kong. It’s Osama, and Hitler.

Also in Hong Kong, we visited Gods of Desire as I described in this piece for Core77.

It’s a wonderful example of local design for local culture. GOD is a lifestyle store not unlike IKEA, selling a broad range of products for the home–furniture, linens, kitchenware, accessories, and the like. But many of the products take local Hong Kong culture and turn it into an icon of consumption. For example, there are t-shirts that offer nonsensical English slogans that are phonetically similar to an offensive Chinese phrase. For example: “Delay No More”–innocuous in English, but its Cantonese homonym is a crass and foul insult involving one’s mother. There are graphic prints of Hong Kong newspaper collages, or of Yaumati (the iconic building frontage from a Hong Kong neighborhood), both ubiquitously applied to notebooks, flip-flops, bags, aprons, boxer shorts, and beyond. Even Mao, a significant symbol of Hong Kong/Chinese history, appears as an ironic icon, co-opted and reclaimed for the culture of the current generation.

So while the Hitler thing in Mumbai is pretty hard to understand, I’m on board with John in terms of the precedents out there already.

One stance is that technology is neither inherently good or bad, it’s what we do with it, as humans with the ability to choose and judge and reflect our own cultural norms, that’s where the morality comes in. Of course, there are any number of agents along the way to actual use. Those that package a technology in a way that instructs in its usage may persaude or encourage behaviors that are not “approved” of. We see the media blaming cell phones, texting, the Internet whenever possible - it’s a better headline than to blame a gun, or a parent, or a person. Where does the accountability lie?

An emerging special case is the set of technologies that we can use to misrepresent reality to others. The first that caught my eye (back in 2004) was SoundCover (company website is now defunct, but story is here), software that would play fake background noises over your mobile phone, to add credence to an excuse (i.e., “I’m stuck in traffic.”). A more recent mobile twist is the popularity dialer that will automatically call you at pre-arranged times so you can look popular, or fake an exit from a bad date, or whatever. Hacking social norms and faking reality through technology.

Those are both sort of high-schoolish in concept and implementation, but the super-geekery (and with it, super-powers) come in a couple of tools for digital photography. HP has some software built into their digital cameras that automatically slims the subjects of the photo, while some software in development in Israel will automatically beautify women’s faces. Tourist Remover carries less cultural baggage and lets you get the picture you never really got, by taking a few pictures of the same scene and putting together a composite without all those other pesky people.

HP’s entry is the most surprising, for a rather cautious organization, it seems pretty brazen. Every week is another indicator of our culture’s poor health (X-rays don’t work as well because people are too fat, toilet seats are being redesigned for fatter butts, etc. etc.), and of course our body image standard doesn’t change in the same direction. Is this technology for vanity? Or worse? Or is it any better than correcting red-eye? Or removing a blemish in Photoshop? Where do we cross the line from correcting photography to faking reality, and when is that line-crossing a problem?

[Thanks, JZC, for the HP tip]

We see these in small retail all the time - handwritten signs exhorting the customer to follow some non-natural path of behavior in order to simplify the merchant-centered purchase process. Here’s a fun one, where the experience is pretty cool anyway, and the creativity and ineffectiveness of the signs is something to smile about, rather than grimace.

The setting certainly helps. In the town of Waimea, on Kauai, on your way to getting a sweet and cold treat - shave ice.

The cash register sits underneath the most awesomely diverse and interesting list of flavors. You approach the guy at the cash and of course you want to say how many you want, and what sizes, and (after having gaped open-mouthed at the display for a few minutes) the flavors.

The signs attempt to warn you off from doing that, but it’s human nature. And with each person that tries to ask for a flavor, the cash guy tells them ‘I don’t care about flavors. I just need to know what size you want.”

They are so dogged with their insistence, but they’ve designed an experience where it’s entirely natural to ask for the flavors right then. Nope.

He’ll go and get the plain shave ice (with ice cream, if you want it) and then at another counter they take your flavor order. It may end up being the same guy working the other counter, or someone else. But they don’t care about flavors, until you get to the flavor counter.

It’s not so terrible that they go through the same thing over and over again, it’s just a great example of design and human nature and the ever-present sign which purports to fix the whole thing by simply warning people what not to do!

This sign is posted behind the cashier.
1. How many Shaved would you like (ice)?
2. What are the sizes you would like?
3. Would you like ice cream on the bottom?
4. Would you like our tasty creams on the top of your ice We have Vannilla Cream And also Haupia cream (which is coconut)
5. We do also sale extras so this would be the time to ask for them
Mahalo (thank you)

The cutaway detail of the Halo Halo Shave Ice is pretty neat. Nice combination of 2D and 3D presentation of the details:
Haupia cream topping
cocohut
Shave Ice
Haupia cream topping
Halo Halo
Ice cream opsional [sic] with Halo Halo

I wrote about our connection to others who have the same product we do

When we go through decisions to acquire things that are visible, in many cases, that’s a personal decision. The belongingness we feel when we observe that in someone else is a great deal of fun, not a product of personal inadequacy. I wouldn’t nod at someone else carrying a can of Coke. I might nod at someone else wearing a Rolling Stones tongue shirt. Hey, I might nod at someone else drinking a can of Jolt (I drink neither, I’m just hypothesizing about the level of identity, meaning, uniqueness, tribal, outsider, etc. embedded in the various product choices). I do have a few shirts with tongues on ‘em, however.

Today Karl Long points out a site that tracks the top cameras used on flickr (the info is stored inside the photo file and can be extracted if you know where to look, I guess), and my camera - the Nikon D50 - is the top one listed.

For no real good reason, this makes me feel good. I have recommended this camera to others; I feel a bit of personal investment in the brand of the camera+model, this is some silly validation of my decision and loyalty, I guess. Popular doesn’t always equal good, but at an emotional level I’m going to choose to ignore that.

I’m pretty psyched to gently announce a new service offering that I’m leading: CultureVenture

CultureVenture provides immersive and inspirational experiences in foreign cultures to help you discover and make sense of the notable differences in your other markets.

We provide experiences, insight, observations, and analysis. We’re not tour guides, and we’re not experts in how the rest of the world works.

Together we’ll go shopping, sit in cafes, watch curious TV ads, take the metro, get lost, and sample new cuisines. We’ll take pictures, ask questions, and summarize our key learnings.

We’ve seen amazing things happen when we’ve taken clients to new locations and helped them to look around and just experience things. In some cases, that has been more impactful to the organization than the explicit data collection through ethnography or other tools. These cultural signposts are really exciting to me and make great stories that I’ve been using in my presentations for the past few years in one form or another.

I announced the service at UX Week last week (since my session was on Cross-Cultural Research, it seemed like it was time to start going public). Obviously, the website needs some work; more explanation, more links to photographs and stories and writing that make the case. We’ll be building up the network of domestic and international (depending on where we all live) partners and getting that online, and I hope to have some case studies from client work up there before too long.

But meanwhile, CultureVenture is open for business. If you’re interested in getting out of your world and into the world your customers inhabit, drop us a line.

Note: Portigal Consulting is still doing what it does; consider this a related but separate service.

Back in May we told you about McDonald’s setting up a ludicrous Global Moms Panel and today here’s KFC doing the same thing.

KFC today announced the formation of its KFC Moms Matter! Advisory Board. Moms from all walks of life and different parts of the country will join a group of mothers employed by KFC on the new Advisory Board. The group will help KFC harness the experience that motherhood provides, and channel that knowledge into ways to better meet moms’ needs.

Julienne Smith, founder and author of “Food For Talk,” a recipe box of conversation starters that promote family bonding, will join the Advisory Board as an expert contributor.

“As a mom and author, I know from experience that families are starved for quality time,” says Smith, who describes herself as a “professional mom.” “Meals are a great occasion to reconnect and who better than KFC to bring us all to the table to talk about ways to make that time mean even more.”

The Advisory Board will meet in person bi-annually, hold quarterly conference calls and host monthly dinner meetings in their hometowns to gain information and advise KFC on everything from trends that affect families to new product ideas. Its first task will be to work closely with the company to establish a user-friendly, online community aimed at reducing everyday stress for moms. In development over the next year, the online community will roll- out nationally for all moms to share in 2007. Moms will be able to use the site to receive tips, participate in webcasts, win weekly drawings and contribute to an e-newsletter.

This sounds a little better than McDonald’s version, which focused on superstar overachieving Olympian moms and had little to say about what the results would be. But it also seems that KFC has already figured out what they will be launching, so is this a usability panel? And do we trust this company when they tried to convince us in 2003 that we’d lose weight by eating their food?

A new restaurant in Mumbai is called “Hitler’s Cross.”

A huge portrait of a stern-looking Fuehrer greets visitors at the door. The cross in the restaurant’s name refers to the swastika [originally a Hindu icon - SP] that symbolized the Nazi regime.

“This place is not about wars or crimes, but where people come to relax and enjoy a meal,” said restaurant manager Fatima Kabani.

Now that is some serious PR spin! All you need is “our consumers tell us that…” and it’d be in the top 10 of all time.

It reads like a marketing class exercise (or dare), doesn’t it? Find some way to take the most negative thing imaginable and productize it or present it as a benefit or a brand.

We saw Little Miss Sunshine on Saturday (highly recommended) in our first visit to a theater in months and months. The guy in front of us (English likely being a second language) asked for tickets to Snacks On A Plane (good luck, buddy, snack boxes are $5 now).

Anyway, at the risk of adding to a heavily crowded blog-topic, “Snakes on a Plane,” the wildly hyped high-concept movie, turned out to be a Web-only phenomenon this weekend, as that horror-comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson took in just $15.2 million at the box office in its opening days. The article runs through the history of the film and the hype and the marketing and the buzz pretty nicely, but did any of us expect it to do well? It seems like there’s some confusion between irony, post-irony, and post-post-irony…okay, that’s a lot of bullshit, but my way of saying that it can be fun to be involved with something that you know is crap, but that’s a very different sort of loyalty than, say, Harley-Davidson owners with company-logo tattoos and wardrobes that consist entirely of HOG-branded t-shirts.
Update: shortly after posting this I see on BoingBoing that a guy did indeed get a SoaP tattoo - I don’t think this changes my thesis, but it is ironic.

Studio sez: Hey, here’s a bad movie.
We say: Hey, that is a really bad movie. Ha-ha! We can’t believe how bad it is! You should, oh, I dunno, add some more cursing into it, heh heh, it’s soooo bad. It’s bad. A bad movie. Heh.
Studio sez: Yeah! It’s a BAAAAD bad movie. Here’s some more cursing. And more over-the-top bad stuff. We know you know it’s bad.
We say: Hey, they put more cursing into it! It’s pretty silly and funny and bad. It’s a bad movie.
Studio sez: You know that we know that you know it’s bad.
We say: Yeah, it’s a bad movie. Snakes on a plane, yo. Heh.
Your mom sez: Are you fellas going to see this snake movie?
We say: Hey! Bad movie! Snakes on a plane!
Studio sez: Here it is! The movie you have been talking about.

[crickets chirping]

Come on! How much appeal is there for crap, compared to the appeal of making fun of crap? Just because the studio got in on the fun, doesn’t mean anyone was really persuaded or had much intention. I guess a Rocky Horror cult particpation thing could have emerged (and still could; it’s early days, some of these films take on second and third and beyond lives), but it didn’t seem likely.

And as I posted before, the meme definitely jumped the shark. I don’t know if they talked about the movie on The View, but I wouldn’t be surprised. If being ironic is supposed to be cool, I don’t want Barbara Walters or Parade Magazine in on the joke with me.

Our hotel in Washington was just blocks away from The Phillips Collection, a small museum (made up of an old house and a modern extension). I paid $12.00 to see the Klee exhibit (although the permanent collection is free). I don’t remember the last time I went to museum alone; lacking much of a grounding in art and artists it’s that much more of a challenge without someone to talk it over with — even the basics of who these artists were and what they were known for is helpful in order to build up a bit of a vocabulary. Given that, the Klee exhibit was worthwhile since I learned a fair amount about the artist and saw a lot of his work (I remember that he was actively championed in the US but never came here, was insanely prolific, had enormous variety in visual styles).

My favorite pieces were from the permanent collection, although much of it seemed browned and faded and cracked (more than I’ve never noticed in other galleries). Too much of the commentary had to do with the Collection itself (I learned a new word: deaccession, the removing of a work from a collection).

The Luncheon of the Boating Party (Renoir) is very cool. It was given a prominent place at the end of a small room. It’s one of those paintings where you think a light is being shone upon it, but it’s all in how it was painted. It just glowed with light, and with the complex energy and stories of these characters all in place.

Philip Guston, Untitled - 1980. I don’t know why I liked this, I just did. The cartoon-y look certainly appealed.

Approaching a City by Edward Hopper was a familiar and surprising subject for a painting. This would be a great photograph, but who would think to paint it?

Nicolas de Staël (I’m not sure this was the piece I saw; they had a few de Staël and all were amazingly thick-thick-thick with layers of paint, very cool in person but useless to see here).

Obviously these compressed on-screen images aren’t meant to evoke anything except recognition.

Steve is once again teaching Design Research Methods at CCA in San Francisco.

I’m totally psyched to report that starting in September, I’ll be teaching Design Research Methods again at CCA in San Francisco, in partnership with Todd Wilkens.

Two interesting signs from Salt Pond Beach on Kauai, Hawaii.


That’s some pretty impressive improvisation from the county. Sure, it looks like hell, and is a little embarrassing (these are “official” County signs?) but it fits right in Hawaii, especially the laid-back culture of Kauai. But mostly what I think about is the non-standard problem solving. What layers of bureaucracy would the park manager have to go through to get a new sign printed up? How long would it take? Meanwhile, they’ve taken some initiative to get their problem solved (including some non-standard mounting solutions).

Here’s an amusing but important official sign.

And an even more official sign that is pretty confusing. Who takes a bath in the restroom? And what is a rubber balloon and why is there a problem?

One more improvised sign, slightly more visually appealing (but with a much simpler message).

Rob Walker’s Consumed takes a look at Poketo

The project that became Poketo began in 2003 with a show at a space called Build, in the Mission District, featuring work by six artists. This time, in addition to paintings, the exhibition included wallets. The physical objects were all the same (stitched-together vinyl and plastic, folding to 4 inches by 4 inches), but each artist printed his or her own design on a set of a dozen wallets, which were priced at $15 each. While it is not unusual for a well-known artist to dabble in consumer goods that are more accessible to a wider audience, the wallets essentially reversed that formulation. These consumer goods served as promotional items that might draw attention to the work of a lesser-known artist. “We wanted to expose our friends to the wider world,” Myung says. Wallets were a particularly good medium, in that they are carried around, not hung on a wall at home.

We bought two of these gorgeous wallets at WonderCon a couple of years ago. I got a lot of great comments for my interesting wallet, featuring a sci-fi cartoon scene with aliens and interplanetary landscapes.

Not my wallet, but similar, by the same artist, Martin Ignatius Cendreda.

But it was a piece of crap. It was horribly designed, with insufficient holders for cards and an extraneous change purse (change purse? In a wallet?). And it didn’t last at all. I repaired it myself with clear packing tape many times. I was thrilled to have an ordinary item that was made special by its visual and artistic appeal, but why trade off basic functionality? Eventually, I gave up. I bought a recycled rubber wallet that is more subtle in its beauty (and its story), and I won’t go back to something that doesn’t work for me. I’d like to have seen Walker (or anyone else that reviews the work of these darlings) acknowledge that the product isn’t usable and doesn’t last.

My colleagues and I used to talk about productizing the idea of “having a vacation in your own backyard” (pre 9/11, even). The SF Chron is running a series in the travel section detailing just how to do that. In today’s edition, a couple spends their summer vacation at Santana Row (a horrifyingly fake-fancy mall in San Jose)

Inside, sunny Mediterranean gave way to light walls, dark wood and clean, vaguely Asian lines. We made good use of the rooftop pool (as did a margarita-fueled girlfriend weekend party) and small but well-chosen selection of equipment in the gym before having a marvelous dinner at Citrus.

Feeling sophisticated and far from home, we crossed the courtyard to Vbar, whose dramatic red light, setting liquor bottles aglow against the ebony back bar, has won a degree of local fame. From the balcony, we looked across to apartments and condos above the stores. Most were still open, and the streets were buzzing. We hit the sidewalks again, entering a New Orleans-style flow of partiers drifting in and out of bars, restaurants and stores, drinks in hand.

After a late movie at CineArts at the edge of Santana Row, we made our way back through the throngs at 1 a.m. Wiggling through the line waiting to get up to Vbar, we flashed our room key at the bouncer. He made a path for us to the elevator, where we ignored someone’s abandoned drinks. For the second time that day, we retreated into the hotel’s soothing quiet.

The shops and restaurants, perfectly designed to mimic Old World elegance, do feel a bit like Europe’s grand shopping avenues, even if the illusion ends at parking lots or busy thoroughfares within a few blocks. The polished mimicry also feels a lot like Downtown Disney, and the artifice can be enervating. In the morning, we were happy to head back to our ordinary surroundings, but Santana Row’s beautiful buildings, cars, landscaping and people made for a delightfully indulgent and restful interlude.

Today’s Brevity:

WTF? The song was written in 1974 and was a hit for Kim Carnes in 1981 (ignore the typo on that page that puts it ahead 10 years).

So much for reflecting something vaguely current!

Notes from my UXWeek session are online (not sure how helpful they are without hearing me talk through the issues, (Update: you can hear me talk through the issues here) but if you want to, check out Dan Saffer’s notes or the notes from the wiki.

Hawai’i makai/mauka signs

different orientation toward navigation: toward mountain, toward ocean
difference in how we move through space

so what?
mundane observations reveal differences in cultural needs or drivers

Tokyo Times points us to a car that wears its kawaii on its er um tires. Benny the Cab, anyone?

A uniquely horrible part of our trip to Kauai was stopping here for a shave ice. This place was staffed by a gaggle of poorly trained, incompetent, aggressive, rude teenage girls. They stood behind their window and acted as if the people on the other side were not human, but merely objects. One stood there talking loudly about her social plans for that evening, ignoring the long line. Another complained about the line, and how much work she had. “I hope this fucking line goes away soon! I’m so sick of people!” she yelled to her friends, not 18 inches from the fucking people who were waiting to give her money. Everyone was made to feel as if they were inconveniencing these girls’ lives. One man received his shave ice in a foam cup with a leak; he went back up to return it or get a new cup and they were horrible to him; he shouldn’t expect anything from them since he only spent a few bucks!

This place is in the Hanalei Center on the north side of the island. Do not go there.

We only saw one other shave ice place on the whole island, Jo-Jo’s Shave Ice in Waimea. The experience there was great. This place here sucks.

Hawaii, especially Kauai is a tourist economy; people were appropriately awesome in most places we went to. This place was off the scale in the other direction. Please stay away.

Michael gave one of the keynotes today at UXWeek. He is a great storyteller with a wonderful self-deprecating style (that somehow combines with an amusing cynicism about some of those around him; but yet he’s genuine in it all). His talk essentially focused on his learning moment(s) as a designer around being user-centered.

He took on a pro-bono project to rename/rebrand/create a logo/etc. for a project to redo decrepit libraries in NYC schools. In a post-modern fashion, he presented his deliverables for that client in a dry and critical tone, mocking his own “big ideas” in a way that made it clear he no longer sees them as big ideas any longer. It was an interesting line to skate, there is always bullshit and performance in trying to convince someone that a new idea (or a trite idea, brought in for the first time, etc.) is a valid one, and it’s easy to present the same idea as genius or crap depending on the tone of voice. Listen to some old Bob Newhart recordings for a concrete example (Tob-acco… er, what’s tob-acco, Walt? It’s a kind of leaf, huh?… and you bought eighty tonnes of it?!!… Let me get this straight, Walt… you’ve bought eighty tonnes of leaves?… This may come as a kind of a surprise to you Walt but… come fall in England, we’re kinda up to our…).

Bierut’s ideas were completely inappropriate and indicated how poorly he understood the problem. The client took him out to see the libraries, and he got it. Instantly, and hugely. And the design work that he and many others collaborated one was wonderful. Framed as a story about his own failures, it’s actually a story about success. But the framing is what makes the telling of the story so genius.

Bierut gave his client a new treatment for the library. In a funny PowerPoint build he went from
Library
to
Library!
to
L!brary
to
L!brary

He planned to deliver a full specification document indicating fonts and treatment and all the rest, but in the interim, the client took control over the logo and started using it whatever way they wanted. He realized that this was okay, and that the cultural (and indeed design) benefits outweighed any super-specification desire he might have projected on them.

One awesome and obvious (in hindsight) example of this dawning user-centered perspective was in how Michael and his team referred to these different libraries being designed. Before meeting the librarians, he referred to them by the architect (i.e., the Peter Arkle (sp!) library) but afterwards he learned that it was referred to as “Vince’s library” - a classic user research insight - different groups call things by different names, revealing their underlying use model!

Five things he learned
1. Innovation is overrated*
2. You get power by giving away power
3. The real opportunity may be outside your scope of work
4. Consistency does not equal sameness
5. Take care of the experience and the brand will take care of itself

The “innovation” comment was challenging and Ryan Freitas asked about it. Bierut added that “innovation has never been a profound motivator for me…design has to work within conventions to work.” Seems like we’re approaching the I-word with some different things in mind. Bierut felt he started off being too “clever” - which I hear as new for new’s sake - and that wasn’t the right thing to do. I don’t think innovative means shocking, obviously new, different, and all that. I think innovation can be invisible and brilliant and seamless to adapt to, with that whiff of exhaled “ooh!” that happens afterwards. To a graphic designer, the word may mean something else.

Despite all the training, the swanky Palomar Hotel, site of UX Week, isn’t able to get basic things like room reservations (ObSeinfeld: “See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to *hold* the reservation”) sorted out. I wasn’t the only one it seems that arrived (hot and dusty from a long long voyage) to find some polite confusion at the front desk. And today (after friendly but pungent maintenance men visited my room during the well-communicated fire alarm test) a polite person knocked on my door to see if my room was indeed occupied.

Anyway, more content stuff to come (great keynote by Michael Bierut), and there’s a wiki right now it seems to be for attendees only here. Surreal moment of zen last night when the very “guy” bartenders at the billiards bar where Google hosted a (recruiting) party poured out pitchers of shots (of what they referred to as a concoction and had us all toast - like patrons of wet-t-shirt-nite - to GOOOOOOOOOOGLE!!!!!!!!!! It was a viral-video/co-creation opportunity waiting to happen.

Refreshing piece in the NYT (since it omits the usual players and the jokes about anthropology) about the importance of getting out of the office and getting to where your customers are.

Once a year, though, he organizes a different kind of hunt — which he calls a “branch hunt.” In it, the entire organization turns its attention from the suite to the street — and, by scrutinizing the fine details of how banks interact with their customers, sees the market from a new perspective.

“The most thoughtful and articulate strategies tend to come from the big banks,” Mr. Brown explained. “But their actual results seldom bear that out. When you walk the streets and look at what’s happening, the gap between strategy and execution becomes obvious. We can’t just listen to what executives say. We have to see with our own eyes what customers are experiencing.”

The dress code for a branch hunt is casual, but the approach is rigorous. For its fourth annual hunt, Second Curve pinpointed the location of every branch of every bank on the East Side of Manhattan, from 25th to 86th Streets.

All the firm’s employees — the analysts, the compliance officer, the computer geek, the receptionist — divided into teams, were assigned specific avenues and streets and set out with digital cameras, audio recorders and four crisp $100 bills for each team. They spent time at the branches, chatted up bank employees, opened checking accounts with the company-issued cash, snapped photographs — not a popular practice with bank security — and captured the flesh-and-blood experience of being a customer.

After the hunt, the teams returned to headquarters and described what they saw, from stories about horrible or remarkable service, to reports on flat-screen televisions that were meant for customers’ viewing but were occasionally found in truly bizarre places where the public could not see them.

On the front cover of today’s issue of Parade magazine (Parade magazine!!!)
the Inside Story of
Snakes On A Plane